Finding transiting exoplanets with NGTS

The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a ground-based project to search for extra-solar planets transiting their host stars. Its primary goal is to find Neptune-sized planets, and perhaps the largest rocky planets ("Super-Earths") around stars that are also bright enough to enable follow-up studies to determine their masses and densities, and to investigate the planets' atmospheric compositions, for example with the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The NGTS observatory consists of twelve 20cm telescopes working together to provide a wide 96 square degree field of view. Each telescope is equipped with a "deep depleted" CCD Camera that is most sensitive at red optical wavelengths, ideal for maximising the probability of finding small radius planets orbiting low mass, cool stars. NGTS achieves a photometric precision of 0.1%, a factor 10 improvement on previous ground-based transit surveys.

The NGTS telescopes are located at the European Southern Observatory's primary station at Paranal, Chile, the home of the famous VLT. Full operations began in early 2016. Millions of stars are monitored nightly by NGTS for between ~100 days and nine months. Already, NGTS has accumulated several hundred Terabytes of data, and millions of images, that have to be searched automatically by sophisticated algorithms and bespoke software.

NGTS has already discovered around 25 new exoplanets. At Leicester, we are leading the photometric follow-up of NGTS exoplanet candidates. After carefully selecting targets from among thousands of light curves highlighted by the automatic algorithms, we use telescopes at the South African Astronomical Observatory to confirm bona fide transits, identify mimics such as background binary stars, and to refine the orbital periods.

The NGTS team at Leicester would like to attract an enthusiastic PhD student to participate in the work leading to these exciting exoplanet discoveries.

Once new exoplanets have been confirmed, the student will have the opportunity to work on characterising some of them through analysing photometry of the transits and radial velocity observations to measure their masses.

The NGTS telescopes are also used for several more exciting exoplanet projects that a student has the opportunity to participate in.
For example, we use NGTS data to confirm exoplanet discoveries from NASA's TESS satellite, provide additional long term data to refine their orbital periods and ephemerises, hunt for long period planets which have only been seen to transit once by TESS, and to search for very young planets in open clusters. All of these projects are open for any member of the NGTS consortium to join.

Finally, in its survey data NGTS is also gathering long term, high cadence, observations of a host of different types of variable stars and other celestial objects. We would particularly encourage a PhD student to exploit some of these non-exoplanet data, for example by searching for and studying eclipsing very low mass red dwarf binaries, and other rare types of binary stars.

Further details of the NGTS project can be found on our website http://ngtransits.org/index.html